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Can anybody make a serious, imaginative movie about slavery without being either ignored or picked at? \u00a0Quentin Tarantino spent almost as much time shaking off flak for his flamboyant genre goof Django Unchained<\/em> as he did taking bows and counting money. When Jonathan Demme made Toni Morrison\u2019s Beloved<\/em> into a far-better-in-hindsight movie in 1998, not even the Great and Powerful Oprah\u2019s approbation of, and involvement in its production could make black people assemble en masse to see it when it was released. (Or anybody else. The cost was about $58 million; the movie made about $23 million, at best.)<\/p>\n At least, nobody\u2019s ignoring 12 Years a Slave<\/em>. It\u2019s at or near the top of just about everybody\u2019s year-end list of best movies. As of the second week of December, it\u2019s made more than $35 million in American ticket sales with more expected around the bend in advance of Oscar season. Still, the movie has attracted its own high-visibility flak from such critics as Armond White, who believes Steve McQueen\u2019s often-graphically violent rendering of Solomon Northrup\u2019s testament as \u201ctorture porn\u201d and \u201cless a drama than an inhumane analysis.\u201d<\/a> David Edelstein, though he believed the movie \u201csmashingly effective as melodrama,\u201d is less fond of McQueen\u2019s \u201ccold, stark, deterministic\u201d <\/a>approach to the material.<\/p>\n For the record, I admired\u00a012 Years a Slave<\/em> far more than I loved it. An American\/Hollywood director, no matter how smart or savvy, wouldn’t have trusted as much visually as McQueen does here. (In case you didn\u2019t know, he\u2019s black and British.) He isn\u2019t afraid of stillness, of the tension and energy that reside in the act of waiting, as in the first frame, which in just showing the barely contained anxiety in the faces of slaves, gets the movie moving. That said, I doubt very much I will want to see it again. Do I need to watch, once again, a thin young woman getting whiskey tumblers thrown at her head and then having her back stripped of her ebony skin the way you strip a tree of its bark? I do not \u2013 and part of me wonders who would, or who needs to.<\/p>\n Still, because the movie is directed by a black man and is written by another (novelist John Ridley), 12 Years a Slave<\/em> doesn\u2019t get the same mauling Steven Spielberg\u2019s Amistad<\/em> (1997) received in some precincts for making ciphers of its mutinous African slaves and using their rebellion as a vehicle for white nobility. And I doubt very much the contrarian attacks on McQueen and his film will keep it from winning more awards; any more than Django<\/em>\u2019s critics kept Tarantino from collecting a screenwriting Oscar.<\/p>\n But no amount of gold statuettes will stop the haters from jumping on the next filmmaker who wants to take yet another hard, idiosyncratic shot at America\u2019s Original Sin. The only solution: Take more shots, make more movies, go as odd, off-base, strange, funny, stern, cold, hot or heavy as the market can bear \u2013 and then, if you\u2019ve got the gall, go further than that. There\u2019s no dearth of material to draw upon, from the still largely undiscovered country of slave narratives to contemporary fiction by African American writers who are claiming autonomy over their ancestral experience through daringly imaginative means.<\/p>\n You like lists. Here are places to go for such material:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n William and Ellen Craft<\/strong> \u2013 True story: They were married in bondage in 1846 and escaped two years later from Georgia to Philadelphia in disguise; she (above) as an invalid white man and he as \u201chis\u201d valet. It would take someone with an equally attuned ear for both injustice and comedy, but it could be done.<\/p>\n The Good Lord Bird<\/strong><\/em> \u2013 Being this year\u2019s surprise National Book Award winner, James McBride\u2019s picaresque comic saga of a young slave boy mistaken as a girl by abolitionist John Brown has likely attracted a few cautious glances from Hollywood. Sophisticated historical satires aren\u2019t exactly meat-and-potatoes fare for multiplexes, no matter who\u2019s involved. But it would be funny, again, if the right tone is struck.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Flight to Canada —<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>An Ishmael Reed seriocomic pastiche that’s never received the credit it deserves for initiating a wave of black novelists claiming imaginative autonomy over their ancestral past in daring, often incendiary fashion. \u00a0I can’t begin to imagine who would make a movie out of it or what kind of movie it would be. But whenever or however it’s done, it’ll be different from anything that came before.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Robert Smalls Steals a Rebel Ship\u2013<\/strong> Another true story; this one about a slave (above) who in 1862 commandeered a cotton freighter with a crew of 17 fellow escapees and managed to hide his identity from Confederate checkpoints, even Fort Sumter, towards the open sea until he was able to raise a white flag to Union blockaders. That alone would be a good movie, though it was just the beginning for Smalls, who later became one of the few African Americans to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives during Reconstruction. (Speaking of which, don’t you think that by now, some great movie about black folk during Reconstruction could be made to counter that damned\u00a0Birth of a Nation<\/em>? Just add it to the wish list.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Known World<\/strong><\/em> \u2013 Edward P. Jones\u2019 award-winning novel about blacks owning black slaves already made readers\u2019 heads spin off their necks. A movie version could magnify the shock-and-awe and I\u2019m being REALLY optimistic when I say it could be done. But \u00a0I’m betting it wouldn\u2019t cause nearly as much trouble as\u2026<\/p>\n The Confessions of Nat Turner<\/strong> <\/em>\u2013 And, yes, I mean William Styron\u2019s version, which has been cherished and despised in near-equal measure by black and white readers alike. America wasn\u2019t ready for Turner in the 1830s and they still aren\u2019t ready for him in whatever form he\u2019s presented or imagined. Which doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be attempted.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n